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FEATURE: STATE OF THE CIO
CIOS HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO
TAKE CENTRE STAGE IN LEADING A
TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE.
ServiceNow is the right way to go. Go and do
it. We can’t do any better, so we’re going to
get out of the way’.
With other members of the
C-suite unlikely to be IT experts
how can CIOs educate them on
how IT is providing value for
money for an organisation?
I think it’s educating them on what it
is they’re trying to achieve and how
technology enables that. I think actually
the better CIOs who have done this well
speak less about the technology and
the gadgetry and say: ‘We know what
you’re trying to achieve, we know what
the outcomes are. We’ve got a bunch of
platforms or capabilities that align and
deliver that value for you.’
Image and quote
from Chris Bedi, CIO,
ServiceNow
educators at the same time. They surround
themselves with lots of smart architects,
enterprise architect type people. One of the
most successful CIOs I’ve seen is actually
based in Singapore and he came from HR.
CIOs are less technical than they’ve ever
been because cloud services have grown and
matured over time. They do so much more in
a commoditised way than before. In AWS,
you can push a button and 20 seconds later
you’ve got a full stack of an application.
How can CIOs collaborate with
CHROs to ensure that they can
recruit the right talent?
I’m recruiting people at the moment and so
is our CIO and we’ve looked at it and said:
‘The skills we’ve got traditionally in IT are
OK for maybe the last few years, but they’re
not going to be the ones that we recruit in
the future.
So what skills then will be
needed in the future?
So I think for the CIO, it’s about alignment
and delivering value, but also understanding
truly the outcome that the business is trying
to get to. And in some cases, helping support
that and in other cases, getting out of the
way, and saying: ‘A cloud-based platform like
www.intelligentcio.com
How important is it for CIOs to
be effective communicators?
I would say more so than ever. Many of
the new breed of CIOs that we see are
amazingly good communicators and
You’ve got things like algorithm mechanics,
which sounds very much like they have got
a tool kit with a bunch of spanners in it. It’s
more around people that can pull disparate
data sources together, that historically we
may have looked at, as ‘garbage in, garbage
out’ type of things. Between this data in
finance or HR, when we bring them together
and actually have the machines look at it, we
can find data between the silos or the gaps
and get insights.
I think the other interesting one that we’re
seeing in certain areas around heavy
industry and healthcare is this concept of
mixing reality with Virtual Reality. n
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